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Is there any way to find out what pages ranked for a given term historically? I.e. what were the top 10 search results for "Widgets" 6 months ago, 1 year ago, 2 years ago?

If I had a campaign tracking that term, I'd be able to look back, but I do not. Does this data exist anywhere in a format that could be queried?

Across multiple cities and markets, this seems to be a trend. "Chicago coffee shop" or "Minneapolis hair salon" or "Sacramento car repair" - outside the local 7-pack, virtually every result is Yelp, BBB, Yellowpages, etc.

Is this related to algo changes, or simply a result of those national sites pumping major resources into SEO? It just seems to be suddenly far more prevalent than it was even 6 months ago.

I wouldn't worry about linking to a site that also lists your competitors. People are likely to search around looking for service reviews and multiple vendors.

One option is to use the Yelp API to pull recent reviews into your site. I believe the API lets you pull in 3 reviews to display directly on your site:

http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/search_api

One thing to keep in mind when linking to Yelp is to avoid soliciting positive reviews. They want reviews to be as organic as possible:

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/08/dont-ask-for-reviews.html

I've got a new client whose site is set up to redirect the home page to another URL, like www.example.com, redirecting to www.example.com/home/, using a 302 redirect.

Am I correct in assuming that links pointing directly to www.example.com are not passing their full value because it is being redirected with a 302 rather than 301?

(In a nutshell, I want to make sure this resource is still accurate: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/redirection)

Take the example Danny Sullivan posted:

http://searchengineland.com/how-being-friends-on-google-leads-to-better-rankings-87376

In this case, Ford shared www.ford.com, and its friends and followers see that in the SERPs. Hoever, how does that compare with, say, sharing http://www.ford.com/cars/mustang/? Does the entire domain reap the benefit, or just that page? Would people see a "Ford shared this" beneath a search result pointing to ford.com (the home page), even if Ford had only shared this specific interior page?

Or is it too soon to know for sure how this is all going to work?

Across multiple cities and markets, this seems to be a trend. "Chicago coffee shop" or "Minneapolis hair salon" or "Sacramento car repair" - outside the local 7-pack, virtually every result is Yelp, BBB, Yellowpages, etc.

Is this related to algo changes, or simply a result of those national sites pumping major resources into SEO? It just seems to be suddenly far more prevalent than it was even 6 months ago.

I wouldn't worry about linking to a site that also lists your competitors. People are likely to search around looking for service reviews and multiple vendors.

One option is to use the Yelp API to pull recent reviews into your site. I believe the API lets you pull in 3 reviews to display directly on your site:

http://www.yelp.com/developers/documentation/search_api

One thing to keep in mind when linking to Yelp is to avoid soliciting positive reviews. They want reviews to be as organic as possible:

http://officialblog.yelp.com/2010/08/dont-ask-for-reviews.html